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The CEO of Ford has warned that Trump’s economic policies could mean layoffs are coming — to four states that voted for him.

NJ.com’s Matt Arco wrote that Ford CEO Jim Farley said Tuesday that tariffs across North America could wreck the automotive industry.

Tesla and SpaceX CEO Elon Musk — by far the wealthiest person on the planet with a net worth in excess of nearly $380 billion — is now benefiting from new government contracts while simultaneously terminating other contracts.

That's according to policy analyst Will Stancil, who obtained a filing purportedly from a federal grant database showing that SpaceX was awarded a $38.8 million contract from the National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) this week. That contract is for "research and development in the physical, engineering and life sciences," and NASA's Marshall Space Flight Center is listed as the contracting office on file.

Pope Francis harshly criticized the Trump administration for its mass deportation of migrants in a public letter to U.S. bishops published Tuesday. In it he argues that the administration's treatment of migrants goes against church social doctrine and says that a policy built on force “will end badly.”

“The act of deporting people who in many cases have left their own land for reasons of extreme poverty, insecurity, exploitation, persecution or serious deterioration of the environment, damages the dignity of many men and women, and of entire families, and places them in a state of particular vulnerability and defenselessness,” the Pope writes.

Some evangelicals on Sunday slammed President Donald Trump’s abrupt decision to dismantle the US Agency for International Development (USAID), with one leader calling the move “damaging and wasteful.”

As Business Insider reports, “at a press panel following” the National Prayer Breakfast on Friday — during which Trump spoke about “bringing God back into our lives” — “a group of faith leaders, including members of the evangelical community that has long been a base of support for Trump, said they were concerned about the president's recent moves”

Vice President of government relations at the National Association of Evangelicals, Galen Carey, warned the president’s “indiscriminate stop-work orders issued with little or no advanced notice have created chaos and confusion on the ground.”

“This is damaging and wasteful," Carey said. "Some of our members and partners are experiencing crippling cashflow crises, necessitating mass layoffs and abrupt termination of services with no time for responsible transitions."

The faith leader noted while “there are aspects of our foreign aid programs that should be ended and others that could be reformed for greater effectiveness ... this review and reform can be achieved without the wholesale disruption of the many programs that are working well and saving lives."

"We affirm the goal of eliminating wasteful spending throughout government but caution against hastily pursued measures that will prove costly,” Carey said, as Business Insider reports. “The abrupt closure of many effective aid programs will mean that some of the money already spent will have been wasted. Commodities will be lost and food will rot, medicines expire. Other supplies may be stolen or misappropriated because the staff and the partners are not allowed to receive them.”

During the 2024 presidential race, Donald Trump repeatedly claimed that the U.S. economy was terrible under then-President Joe Biden and then-Vice President Kamala Harris. But according to U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS) figures, unemployment stayed under 4.0 percent from February 2022 through April 2024. And U.S. unemployment was 4.1 percent in December 2024, Biden's last full month in office.

Nonetheless, voter frustration over inflation worked to Trump's advantage, and he narrowly defeated Harris by roughly 1.5 percent (according to the Cook Political Report) on Election Day.

During Wednesday’s heated House Committee on Oversight and Government Reform hearing, Chairman Jim Comer and his Republican colleagues blocked a vote on Democratic Ranking Member Gerry Connolly’s motion to subpoena Elon Musk. The Director of President Donald Trump’s so-called Department of Government Efficiency has been accused of systematically dismantling federal agencies one by one, while his associates have allegedly gained access to the private data of potentially millions of Americans, as well as vast amounts of federal government information—including, reportedly, some classified material.

In Wednesday’s hearing on “Rightsizing Government,” Ranking Member Connolly was quickly blocked when he attempted to subpoena the person in charge of all those efforts testify before them.

Elon Musk, now serving as a "special government employee," and his associates at the Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE), reportedly have gained access to government computers at multiple federal agencies. Following widespread public outcry, a handful of Senate Republicans spoke with the U.S. Secretary of the Treasury.

Politico reports that Secretary Scott Bessent "privately reassured Republican lawmakers Monday that Elon Musk and his team do not have control over a sensitive government system that manages the flow of trillions of dollars in payments, according to five lawmakers in the room for a closed-door meeting on Capitol Hill."

President Donald Trump recently ordered the release of massive amounts of water from two California dams, and now local farmers are scrambling to preserve precious freshwater resources needed for dry summer months.

The Los Angeles Times reported Friday that the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers — acting on Trump's orders — released water from the Terminus Dam at Lake Kaweah and the Schafer Dam at Lake Success, which are both in Tulare County in the San Joaquin Valley. Whereas water was originally flowing from the Terminus Dam at 57 cubic feet per second (cfs), it's now reportedly flowing at more than 1,500 cfs. The flow from Lake Success went from 105 cfas to 990 cfs as of Friday morning.

Republicans in Congress are aiming to gut federal safety net programs in order to pass costly policies, like a 10-year extension of tax cuts for the wealthiest Americans. But they may have an unlikely obstacle in the form of President Donald Trump.

Politico's Rachel Bade recently reported that Trump may not have the stomach to ram through trillions of dollars in federal spending cuts, despite the eagerness of many GOP lawmakers. In order to reach their austerity goals, some Republicans have even targeted earned benefits like Social Security and Medicare for potential cuts in the future.

As first responders work to recover bodies from the freezing waters of the Potomac, President Donald Trump, without evidence, suggested that diversity hiring and Democrats were at least partly responsible for Wednesday night’s mid-air collision that claimed over 60 lives. His politicized remarks from the podium on Thursday have sparked widespread outrage, compounding the grief of many Americans grappling with the nation’s first fatal aviation disaster since 2009. In addition to “DEI,” Trump also baselessly pointed fingers at former Presidents Barack Obama and Joe Biden, as well as former U.S. Secretary of Transportation Pete Buttigieg.

The NTSB has only just begun its investigation, which could take years to determine the cause of the deadly collision.

During a Tuesday, January 28 broadcast on CNN, Jim Acosta announced that he was leaving the cable news network — where he had worked since 2007. Acosta and CNN were in disagreement over the timeslot for his show "CNN Newsroom," and the reporter opted to leave CNN after 18 years.

President Donald Trump was quick to attack Acosta after the announcement.

The prosecutor President Donald Trump appointed to an acting role near the top of the Department of Justice had a particularly rough first week at work, according to several emails leaked by his colleagues.

On Wednesday, CNN reported that Ed Martin, who is currently the interim U.S. Attorney for the District of Columbia, has had to contend with his coworkers leaking his emails, along with a disgruntled former prosecutor calling him out in interviews with the press. On Tuesday, Martin sent an email to DOJ personnel complaining that a Monday email he sent ordering an internal review of how federal prosecutors handled January 6 defendants' cases was leaked to the media.

Stephen Miller, President Donald Trump’s White House Deputy Chief of Staff, is under fire after appearing repeatedly to attempt to whitewash the Office of Management and Budget memo that ordered a funding freeze on “all Federal financial assistance, and other relevant agency activities that may be implicated by the executive orders, including, but not limited to, financial assistance for foreign aid, nongovernmental organizations, DEI, woke gender ideology, and the green new deal.”

The OMB memo, which was not publicly rolled out but rather discovered by journalist Marisa Kabas, appears to have led to the shuttering on Tuesday of the Medicaid portals in all 50 states. There were also reports that in addition to the Medicaid portal, the portal for SNAP, the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program formerly known as “food stamps,” also went down on Tuesday, along with other sources or recipients of federal funding.